Lineup Announced for 21st Rendez-Vous with French Cinema

The Film Society of Lincoln Center and UniFrance have announced the lineup for the 21st edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, the celebrated annual showcase of the best in contemporary French film that runs March 3-13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. These 21 feature films making their New York, U.S., or North American premieres demonstrate that the landscape of French cinema is as fertile as ever, and the voices calling from it never more distinct.

“We are extremely pleased to continue our 21-year partnership with UniFrance to bring a brilliant selection of French films to New York,” said Film Society of Lincoln Center Associate Director of Programming Florence Almozini. “This year’s lineup exemplifies the diverse creativity coming out of the country year-round, including a record eight films directed by women.”

“Reflective of the turbulence in France in the last year, these artists have expressed their emotions, doubts and fears in their films,” said Executive Director of UniFrance Isabelle Giordano. “This is why I am so proud to bring to New York audiences the best of French cinema. The rising and established talents behind the 21 selected films combine high artistic ambition with a strong political commitment. Voices of directors like Alice Winocour, Nabil Ayouch, Emmanuelle Bercot, Philippe Faucon are worth being listened to as they say a lot about the chaos of our world today.”

The Opening Night selection is Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, featuring tour-de-force performances by Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu as a long-divorced couple who reconnect six months after their son’s suicide, with Nicloux and Huppert in person. Closing the festival is Jacques Audiard’s Cannes Palme d’Or–winning Dheepan, a harrowing, genre-bending portrait of three refugees who flee Sri Lanka only to end up in the equally violent housing projects outside Paris.

The series also features the latest from established favorites Julie Delpy (Lolo), Philippe Faucon (Fatima), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (Story of Judas), and Catherine Corsini (Summertime), as well as four remarkable debuts: the U.S. premiere of distinguished French actor Louis Garrel’s Two Friends, a tragicomic exploration of a love triangle; Nicolas Pariser’s The Great Game, in which a young novelist ghostwrites a manifesto with risky consequences; Rudi Rosenberg’s vivacious coming-of-age tale The New Kid; and Eva Husson’s Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), an unapologetically explicit anthology of the sexual experiments of a group of teenagers over the course of a summer.

Additional highlights include many gems from Cannes and beyond, including Alice Winocour’s domestic thriller Disorder, starring Matthias Schoenaerts and Diane Kruger; Nabil Ayouch’s Much Loved, a portrait of sex workers in Marrakech so unflinching it was controversially banned in Morocco; Emmanuelle Bercot’s study of a teenage delinquent, Standing Tall, with Catherine Deneuve as the youth’s compassionate juvenile court judge; 21 Nights with Pattie, the latest oddball comedy from Jean-Marie and Arnaud Larrieu, about a prim woman who travels to a small village in the Pyrénées to bury her estranged mother but gets mixed up in a surreal police investigation; and the innovatively modernized Chekhov adaptation Three Sisters by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, co-written by Noemie Lvovsky and Caroline Deruas.

Films in this year’s edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema garnered 34 nominations total for this year’s César Awards, which were announced this week. Nominated selections include Dheepan (nine nominations, including Best Film and Director), Standing Tall (eight nominations), Maïwenn’s My King (eight nominations), Fatima (four nominations), Much Loved (Best Actress), Summertime (Best Actress and Supporting Actress), and Opening Night selection Valley of Love (Best Actor and Actress).

Tickets go on sale Thursday, February 18, with early access for Film Society members (Film Buff level or higher) beginning Thursday, February 11. Special thanks to our Premiere sponsors Lacoste & Renault.

Dheepan

Lineup

Opening NightValley of LoveGuillaume Nicloux, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 92mEnglish and French with English subtitlesGuillaume Nicloux’s sui generis, elegiac road movie puts a meta twist on a familiar setup: titans Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert star as famous French actors Gérard and Isabelle, a long-divorced couple whose son Michael has committed suicide six months prior to their Californian rendezvous in Death Valley, occasioned by an enigmatic letter from Michael that seems to have been written some time after his death. The letter asks them to visit a series of sites in the area; at the end of this tour, Michael claims he will appear before them. What follows is an utterly singular trip of a film, by turns melancholic and funny, self-reflexive and surreal. In their first film together since Maurice Pialat’s Loulou in 1980, Depardieu and Huppert astound with their enthralling portrayal of grieving parents who, to an ambiguous degree, appear to be versions of themselves, making for a tour de force as moving as it is complex. A Strand Releasing release.

Closing NightDheepanJacques Audiard, France, 2015, DCP, 109mFrench with English subtitlesJacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this daring, genre-bending portrait of three Sri Lankan refugees—Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), and Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby)—who form a fake family unit to emigrate. When they find themselves living together in a violent, gang-dominated housing project outside Paris, they start to reevaluate the terms of their intimacy. Like his character, the actor and novelist Jesuthasan was a member of the militant nationalist army LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) before fleeing the country and settling into a series of odd jobs in Paris, while eventually renouncing all ties to the Tigers. When, in its bloody last act, his character has to fall back on his military training, Dheepan becomes something darker: a harrowing reckoning with the past. A Sundance Selects release.

21 Nights with Pattie / 21 nuits avec PattieJean-Marie & Arnaud Larrieu, France, 2015, DCP, 115mFrench with English subtitlesThe Larrieu brothers make oddball, tonally mixed comedies unlike anything else in French cinema today. In their latest, a slightly prim woman Caroline (Isabelle Carré) arrives in a small village in the Pyrénées to bury her estranged mother. There, she befriends Pattie (Karin Viard), who offers tales of her sexual adventures with the local men, including a priapic half-man, half-beast creature (Denis Lavant). Caroline’s ongoing debate between pride and pleasure is just one link in a chain of increasingly wild events: the mysterious disappearance of her mother’s body, the ensuing surreal police investigation, and some shocking revelations about her mother’s former lover, who may or not be the writer J.M.G. Le Clézio—played to perfection by André Dussollier. U.S. Premiere

The Apaches / Des ApachesNassim Amaouche, France, 2015, DCP, 97mFrench with English subtitlesLes Inrocks accounted for the six years it took Nassim Amaouche to release his second feature by calling him “a director with a temperament as patient, roving and reflective as his films.” He stars as Samir, a young French-Algerian man lured by a dubious “family” lawyer (André Dussollier) into making an occult business deal within a similarly marginalized setting: one of Paris’s largest and most diverse Kabyle communities. Having been drawn into the family bar business by his estranged father, Samir still agonizes over the memory of his late mother, while falling in love with a beautiful and mysterious single mom (Laetitia Casta). The Apaches is a delicate movie that doubles as a tense negotiation drama and a quiet, reflective memory play. U.S. Premiere

Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)Eva Husson, France, 2016, DCP, 98mFrench with English subtitlesEva Husson’s debut feature, shot and set in the wealthy coastal suburbs of Biarritz, is an unapologetically blissed-out, frankly explicit anthology of the sexual experiments a cluster of teenagers undertake over the course of one summer. Determined to keep the attentions of her favorite boy Alex (Finnegan Oldfield), George (Marilyn Lima) encourages her group of horny friends and acquaintances to start hosting elaborate, sunlight-drenched, EDM-filled swingers parties. Husson doesn’t ignore the students who abstain, but she’s utterly entranced by the excesses, risks, and temptations of George’s universe—a pulsating, slow-motion bacchanal pitched somewhere between the world of Spring Breakers and that of Larry Clark. A Samuel Goldwyn Films release. U.S. Premiere

Dark Inclusion / Diamant noirArthur Harari, France/Belgium, 2016, DCP, 115mFrench with English subtitles“You want them to pay? You have to be lucid, cool, precise. You go there, you see, and you take—that’s payback.” Arthur Harari’s first feature is a poised, stylish, and utterly assured revenge thriller in which violence erupts suddenly amid tense, hushed stretches of talk. Pier Ulmann (Niels Schneider) comes from a family of powerful diamond dealers based in Anvers. After his estranged father’s death, he vows vengeance against his relatives who had abandoned him and returns to the business with an elaborate robbery in mind. Featuring menacing tracking shots; a cool, metallic color palette; surprising third-act reversals; and a terrific ensemble cast, Dark Inclusion is a movie precisely attuned to the logistical and moral complexities that accompany lives of luxurious crime. U.S. Premiere

A Decent Man / Je ne suis pas un salaudEmmanuel Finkiel, France, 2015, DCP, 111mFrench with English subtitles“I am not a bastard!” The literal French translation of the title of Emmanuel Finkiel’s taut, intelligent morality play captures its tone perhaps better than its American name. In the film’s first act, Eddy (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is in a position of strength. Having just been injured in a mugging, he’s earned the sympathy and attention of his estranged family and gotten back on his feet. The same cannot be said for Ahmed (Driss Ramdi), whose life starts falling apart after he’s wrongly accused of the crime. When the case against Ahmed starts to unravel, Eddy has to go back on the defensive… U.S. Premiere

DisorderAlice Winocour, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 101mFrench with English subtitlesAlice Winocour’s follow-up to Augustine (Rendez-Vous 2013)—her study of the 19th-century neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot’s fraught relationship with one of his hysteria patients—is another finely tuned drama of unstable intimacy and mental imbalance. Having just returned from Afghanistan, Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) suffers from night terrors, pummeling headaches, and bouts of paranoia. To distract himself, he gets a job working security at the extravagant chateau of a Lebanese financier, whose beautiful wife (Diane Kruger) he’s soon hired to protect after the husband goes away on business. Disorder evolves from an exercise in nervous, slow-burn suspense into a tense domestic thriller. A Sundance Selects release.

Disorder

FatimaPhilippe Faucon, France, 2015, DCP, 79mFrench and Arabic with English subtitlesMiddle-aged single mother Fatima (Soria Zeroual) lives with her two teenage daughters and works cleaning jobs to pay their way through school. Inspired by a true story and the poetry of the North African writer Fatima Elayoubi, who immigrated knowing very little French and slowly taught herself the language, Faucon’s eighth feature—winner of the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize for Best French Film—is a patient, reflective study of a woman pressured by her children and her neighbors alike to assimilate into a culture of which she’s wary. Despite the display of everyday racism, both veiled and overt; internal domestic disputes; and external gestures of inhospitality, Fatima offers an uplifting experience and one of recent French cinema’s most trenchant and moving portraits of immigrant experience.

The Great Game / Le Grand jeuNicolas Pariser, France, 2015, DCP, 100mFrench with English subtitlesPierre (Melvil Poupaud), a onetime darling novelist disgusted with the publishing world, lets a duplicitous government insider (André Dussollier) tempt him into ghostwriting a manifesto designed to transform the landscape of French public opinion—a shift with risky consequences for the activist (Clémence Poésy) with whom he soon becomes involved. Nicolas Pariser’s debut feature is an elegant political thriller that makes much use of its stellar cast, particularly with the brittle, uneasy rapport between Poupaud—the soulful young man at the center of Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale and Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways—and Dussollier, a resourceful and protean actor who commits to his character’s malevolence with relish. U.S. Premiere

LoloJulie Delpy, France, 2015, DCP, 99mFrench with English subtitlesWriter, director, actor, composer: Julie Delpy is one of current French cinema’s great renaissance talents. In her new movie, a four-string black comedy that develops on the thinking at work in her recent 2 Days in New York, a world-weary fashionista (Delpy) finds her happy new relationship with a divorced, slightly unpolished computer programmer (Dany Boon) threatened by the machinations of her wheeling, malevolent son (Vincent Lacoste). Delpy is a filmmaker with a wise, prickly comic sensibility, and her movies often slide—like screwball comedies—from cerebral verbal banter to outright farce. Lolo is no exception, although it’s also her darkest, riskiest, and most startling movie to date. A FilmRise release. U.S. Premiere

Much LovedNabil Ayouch, France/Morocco, 2015, DCP, 104mArabic and French with English subtitles“What do you know about men?” a voice asks over the opening credits of Nabil Ayouch’s provocative portrait of several female sex workers in Marrakech. “Men are like makes [of cars]: high-end, medium, and sons of bitches. All that matters is the cash.” Noha (Loubna Abidar), Randa (Asmaa Lazrak), and Soukaina (Halima Karaouane) are professional, thick-skinned, and practical about their line of work, which ferries them up and down the city’s class ladder and renders them vulnerable to a catalog of possible abuses. Controversially banned in Morocco for its “contempt for moral values,” Much Loved offers such a candid and unblinking picture of a subculture that it’s a perilous job to represent on screen.

My King / Mon roiMaïwenn, France, 2015, DCP, 128mFrench with English subtitlesTony (Emmanuelle Bercot, in a performance that won her the Best Actress Award at Cannes) and Georgio (Vincent Cassel) are an odd match—or so Tony’s brother Solal (Louis Garrel) thinks when she tells him that they’re falling quickly, recklessly in love. Actor-director Maïwenn’s fourth feature captures the couple’s tempestuous 10-year relationship in retrospect as a string of flash points, eruptions, betrayals, tender reconciliations, and life-altering decisions. At the center of My King’s wide, expansive frames are Bercot and Cassel for nearly every second of its runtime, and the movie stakes itself on their harrowingly committed, nerve-fraying performances. Maïwenn’s formidable new film is one of French cinema’s most memorable recent amour fous. U.S. Premiere

The New Kid / Le NouveauRudi Rosenberg, France, 2015, DCP, 81mFrench with English subtitlesIn this delectable and vivacious debut feature, shy 14-year-old Benoît (Réphaël Ghrenassia) moves to Paris and a new high school, where he’s rejected by his cooler classmates and reluctantly sidelined into a precarious friendship with the “freaks and geeks.” The New Kid is a rare case among coming-of-age movies: a portrait of allegiances made and broken among middle-schoolers that calls special attention to the uglier, less picturesque aspects of passing through puberty. The movie’s rhythm never stalls and its tone stays charmingly light partly thanks to its wonderful cast—a skilled and magnetic group of first-time young actors. U.S. Premiere

Parisienne / Peur de rienDanielle Arbid, France, 2015, DCP, 120mFrench with English subtitlesThe French title of Danielle Arbid’s fourth feature, a luminous study of a young Lebanese woman restlessly accommodating herself to her new home in Paris during the mid-’90s, translates to “fear of nothing.” Lina might sometimes be afraid, but—as played by the great young actress Manal Issa—she’s also intrepid, adventurous, confident, independent, and breathtakingly self-possessed. Parisienne follows her as she flees the abusive uncle in whose care she’s been placed, flits from bed to bed, passes in and out of university classes, makes friends on both extreme sides of the political spectrum, takes a handful of lovers, and, in the movie’s climax, fights a legal battle to stay in the city that’s become hers.

Standing Tall / La Tête hauteEmmanuelle Bercot, France, 2015, DCP, 119mFrench with English subtitlesEmmanuelle Bercot’s fourth feature, which opened last year’s Cannes, is a candid, sympathetic, impassioned study of a teenage delinquent surrounded by adults both callous and supportive. On the latter side is a warm-hearted juvenile court judge (Catherine Deneuve) and a devoted social worker (Benoît Magimel); on the other side stand, it can seem, most other authority figures. Sixteen-year-old Malony (Rod Paradot) is clearly a victim of his circumstances and poor parenting from his basket case of a mother (Sara Forestier), but he’s also a bully, a brute, and a sexually violent offender. Part of the strength of Standing Tall is that it refuses to entirely absolve its central character; instead, it counts on Paradot, a powerful new actor, to render him as a convincingly troubled, tempestuous soul. A Cohen Media release.

My King

Story of Judas / Histoire de JudasRabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, France, 2015, DCP, 99mFrench with English subtitlesFrench-Algerian director-actor Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche boldly renders the final days of Jesus of Nazareth from the perspective of Judas Iscariot in this utterly novel reenvisioning of the key biblical tale. Ameur-Zaïmeche himself stars as Judas, Jesus’s closest disciple, as the two men find themselves swept up in political tumult amid tensions between the Jews and the Romans over the escalating popularity of the man who claims to be the Son of God. Story of Judas is both strikingly stylized (with shimmering, physical cinematography by Irina Lubtchansky, daughter of the late, legendary DP William) and compelling in its engagement with the myth of Judas, interweaving recent revelations about the role he may or may not have played in the real-life Passion story. The result is a ravishing and genuinely new addition to the Jesus film canon. Winner of a Jury Prize in the Forum section at last year’s Berlinale. U.S. Premiere

Summertime / La Belle saisonCatherine Corsini, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 105mFrench with English subtitlesAcclaimed director Catherine Corsini has made melodramas that range in tone from the bleak and violent to the tender and emotionally warm. At first glance, her Locarno prize-winning new film is one of her brightest and most bucolic. Soon after Delphine (Izïa Higelin) moves from her conservative parents’ farm near Limoges to Paris in 1971, she meets the older Carole (Cécile de France), a feminist organizer with whom she embarks on a passionate, mutually invigorating love affair. When a family sickness pulls Delphine back to the farm, Carole has to decide whether to follow her into hostile territory—and Summertime becomes something more complicated and fraught than its seductive, luminous visual palette initially suggests. A Strand Releasing release. U.S. Premiere

Three Sisters / Les Trois soeursValeria Bruni Tedeschi, France, 2015, DCP, 110mFrench with English subtitles“Life is hard. It seems to many of us dull and hopeless; but yet we must admit that it goes on getting clearer and easier, and it looks as though the time were not far off when it’ll be full of happiness.” For her latest project, commissioned by Arte and starring members of the Comédie-Française, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi shot an idiosyncratic, half-modernized adaptation of one of Chekhov’s greatest, most expansively melancholy plays. The three sisters of the title—two unmarried, one unhappily married—congregate in their family’s ancestral house and, along with the additional soldiers, debtors, pensioners, and spouses who populate the play, struggle to give their futures a shape. From a translation by André Markowicz and Françoise Morvan. U.S. Premiere

Two Friends / Deux amisLouis Garrel, France, 2015, DCP, 102mFrench with English subtitlesOne of France’s most distinguished and recognizable actors for over a decade now, Louis Garrel makes his much-anticipated feature-length directorial debut with this clever and moving twist on the ménage à trois. Garrel stars as Abel, a gas-station attendant with literary ambitions, an underage girlfriend, and an always-active libido. Abel is all too accustomed to seducing away the crushes of his best friend, movie-extra Vincent (Vincent Macaigne)—but when an incognito convict working at a pastry counter in the Gare du Nord (Golshifteh Farahani) enters Vincent’s orbit (and, by extension, Abel’s), a comic, manic, and eminently romantic love triangle soon unfolds. Co-written by his frequent collaborator Christophe Honoré, Two Friends marks an auspicious and heartfelt first feature for Garrel, striking a pitch-perfect balance between tragedy and charm. U.S. Premiere

Winter Song / Chant d’hiverOtar Iosseliani, France, 2015, DCP, 117mFrench with English subtitlesThere’s no mistaking the tone and structure of a film by the 81-year-old Georgian director Otar Iosseliani: caustic, mordant, detached, extremely funny, and dizzyingly panoramic. Like several of his earlier films, Winter Song doesn’t center on a single figure so much as a dense cluster of interrelated characters, all united by objects (an executed aristocrat’s skull), places (the apartment building where most of them live), historical events (from the French Revolution to the Russo-Georgian War), and pure coincidence. An aging upper-crust patriarch burning his letters; a tramp hoping to avoid the advances of a steamroller; an 18th-century nobleman who insists on taking his pipe to the guillotine: Winter Song is a well-stocked encyclopedia of human variety, eccentricity, and folly, elevated by an exquisite cast that include Rufus, Pierre Étaix, and Mathieu Amalric. U.S. Premiere

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